


Paenitet enim omnia

by Anna_Hopkins



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, POV First Person, Time Travel Fix-It, surreal experience
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 00:48:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14533059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna_Hopkins/pseuds/Anna_Hopkins
Summary: Based on a prompt of my own creation, https://annabelle-hopkins.tumblr.com/post/170966990984/





	Paenitet enim omnia

**Author's Note:**

> Written with the first few minutes of Chopin's Barcarolle in mind.

Sometime during what would probably be called the Battle of Hogwarts – wizards had so little creativity – I became…distracted. The tides of battle become so tedious after a while; my mind began to wander. The haze that overcame my attentions lifted only just before I killed my prophesied foe; I witnessed a paradigm shift, at that precise instant when the spell connected and the boy collapsed bonelessly to the ground.

In the silence that swept through the clearing, I stared down into the corpse’s eyes, watching as they glazed over, and wondered why so much time and effort had been put into the destruction of what was no more than a child. Rarely does Lord Voldemort rethink his actions: this was one time in which he did.

That haze from earlier began to cloud my focus again, around when I told Lucius’ wife to confirm the boy’s death. It retreated again, so briefly, as I addressed the survivors of the losing side. But the battle was not yet over – reinforcements to their side emerged from outside – and it was clear that my subordinates’ ranks had thinned considerably in this siege. How…unwise…I had been in choosing this strategy.

The crux of the war was now: the last of the Order of the Phoenix, the last staggering few of the Death Eaters, and myself. Perhaps my irritation at my ill-fated choices was visible to my opponents; they seemed determined more than ever to press some illusory advantage. Through the Dark Mark network, I became vaguely aware, also, of Inner Circle members falling…and the hundreds crowded at the edges of the hall, watching…

Suddenly, dear Bella was felled by one of the Order members; I turned to engage that enemy, and found my curse blocked by –

The boy. Again. He was, somehow, _not_ dead. As silence had greeted his death, so it greeted his reappearance; the watchers had exclaimed their shock and then gone silent, or perhaps somehow _been_ silenced. “…and one of us is about to leave for good,” the boy – Potter; I would grant him the grudging respect of a name in this duel – was saying. But if it came down to prophecy, was he really fated to win? I voiced this question aloud. _You think it will be you, the boy who has survived by accident, and because Dumbledore was pulling the strings?_ Even as I said those words, however, something began to seem amiss about all of this. More than one thing in this situation had been engineered by outside forces, and as Potter began to tell me of the ‘true’ mastery of the Elder Wand, I reconsidered his earlier claim. _No more Horcruxes,_ he’d said…and he’d survived the Killing Curse, point-blank, and come out of it visibly unharmed…

For the second time in this accursed battle, Lord Voldemort privately reconsidered the circumstances. As I drew my wand, I assessed the evidence, and concluded: that prophecy had been as self-fulfilling as I should have expected. Potter had been _my Horcrux_. And I had just undone that work, unknowing, less than an hour ago.

The day’s first sunbeams rose past the windows of the Great Hall, and both Potter and I took that as the signal to cast our final spell. With increasing clarity, I recognized this to be the last few seconds of my life: somewhere behind the great labyrinth of my ingrained Occlumentic defenses, the great sustaining ocean of my mind had subsided into bitter resignation. All too well, I saw the symmetry with fleeting moments at the orphanage, decades past, and had I had the time, I would have grimaced.

Yes…it all started in that damned _orphanage_. I wondered, in this final moment, if I could have saved myself all this trouble by having never gone there in the first place. Would that it could have been my choice.

_If you want something done correctly,_ mused Lord Voldemort as his Killing Curse rebounded for a second time in seventy-one short years, _do it yourself_.

He – I – wished I could have. There was a brief greyish spark of _something_ –

 

Then I sat up in a grassy field, and blinked, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the sun. Out toward the horizon, the domes and spires of London sprawled before me, in a very familiar view.

_Is this really what it looks like?_ Because it looks like a terribly convenient _deus ex machina_ , courtesy of the Elder Wand.


End file.
